How to Deal with Our Current ‘Death Spiral,’ Session 9

Special Topics in One World or None

*The Zoom Link for today’s live session is far below.

Last week, we reviewed how physicians played a critical role in reversing the escalation toward nuclear war by reframing the nuclear weapons issue as a public health and humanitarian crisis. The International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) that Dr. Bernard Lown founded with Soviet physicians helped to end the Cold War. They emphasized the medical reality that no healthcare system could adequately respond to the mass casualties, radiation sickness, environmental collapse, and long-term genetic damage that would result from a nuclear fallout. Their nonpartisan, scientific, and ethical stance allowed for them to have the unique credibility that could sway public opinion.

We have arrived at a similar moment, when physician input has become critically necessary. Not only is the world nuclearizing again, as the U.S., Russia, and China are modernizing and expanding their arsenals, but regional powers—such as North Korea, India, and Pakistan—are enhancing their own capabilities. Meanwhile, global tensions over Iran, Ukraine, and Taiwan increase the risk of miscalculation. As trust erodes and new technologies emerge, the barriers to nuclear conflict are weakening, raising the specter of humans becoming the first species on earth to bring about its own extinction.

The psychology that our division into nation-states, and our own atomization, has engendered did not allow for global peace following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The United States, as the world’s sole superpower, used its power to accumulate more power, rather than to pursue the United Nations-driven, collaborative model as it previously had done. If anything, the U.S. accelerated imperialism and global capitalistic domination—choosing a unipolar hegemonic model, much to the world’s chagrin. Now, it has set the path for countries to choose increasingly ever greater competition, thus eroding the cooperation needed to solve our shared, global problems.

The result is that we are now failing on all fronts of our evolutionary task of surviving as a species: entering an era of endless global wars, more dangerous pandemics, and a mindset that propels an ever-accelerating descent into our “Death Spiral.”

In a major essay in April 2023, the highly-regarded public intellectual and special advisor to the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres Prof. Jeffrey Sachs noted:

U.S. foreign policy is based on an inherent contradiction and fatal flaw. The aim of U.S. foreign policy is a U.S.-dominated world, in which the U.S. writes the global trade and financial rules, controls advanced technologies, maintains military supremacy, and dominates all potential competitors. Unless U.S. foreign policy is changed to recognize the need for a multipolar world, it will lead to more wars, and possibly World War III.

With this ominous prediction, Sachs provided a short, to-the-point, overview of the current moment in history, rightly focusing on the urgent need for major changes in U.S. thinking and policies. He continued:

The inherent contradiction in U.S. foreign policy is that it conflicts with the UN Charter, which commits the U.S. (and all other UN member states) to a global system based on UN institutions in which no single country dominates. The fatal flaw is that the U.S. has just 4 percent of the world population, and lacks the economic, financial, military, and technological capacities, much less the ethical and legal claims, to dominate the other 96 percent.

The ultimate defense of this untenable arrangement was to elect a mentally-impaired U.S. president who is much more driven to change the public’s perception of reality, rather than change the facts. He would have a warlike mindset but call himself a “peace president,” invent “facts” that encourage denial of reality, and insist against all evidence that his version of “reality” is true. Keeping him in a position of influence, furthermore, allows for his symptoms to spread in a manner that creates shared psychosis, or what German-American social psychologist Erich Fromm called, “folie à millions,” and what Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called, “psychic epidemic.”

As a result, our contemporary world faces a convergence of existential crises. Having covered “Climate Destruction” a couple weeks ago, I would like to return to the remaining two areas in our Prescription for Survival 2025: “Pandemic Fears” and “World War Dangers.” Here is what we at the World Mental Health Coalition have written:

PANDEMIC FEARS. There is a real and serious possibility of another pandemic that could even be far worse. And yet, unbelievably, Donald Trump has ordered major funding and personnel cuts for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—the three primary institutions that monitor viruses and prepare to deal with and minimize pandemic spread. Trump has even ordered the U.S. to terminate all connections with the World Health Organization (WHO), further declaring that all U.S. government officials must cease to have any contact with that crucial organization.

WORLD WAR DANGERS. International agreements to curtail the development and deployment of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, treaties, and procedures for disarmament that should have been urgently enhanced and expanded, are instead being systematically dismantled. The dangers of some form of either slowly expanding or explosive World War III, which in some countries is already underway in proxy form, are extremely serious. Psychologically, we have been conditioned to accept the casual use of the term “World War III” and the extraordinarily dangerous actual preparations to fight and “win” such a war. Politically, we are ill-equipped to deal with the dangerous psychology of Donald Trump, which will always be attracted to violence, war, and even nuclear war, regardless of his public pronouncements.

With the recent gambles in the Middle East, in which the U.S. bombed Iran on the basis of a unilateral, temperamental action that involved manipulating intelligence, making rogue attacks on executive authority, and destabilizing an already volatile region. It happened with a breakdown of all checks and balances in ways and in degrees that can only happen with a mentally-unstable president.

Therefore, just as physicians played a critical role in reversing escalations toward war by reframing the conflict as not a political issue but as a public health crisis affecting the survival of our species, it is now time for psychiatrists and mental health experts to be involved. No matter the attempts to distort reality and to insist that the bombings “obliterated Iran’s nuclear facilities,” and that the president “deserves a Nobel Peace Prize,” the medical reality remains that objective reality will not be alterable just because of wishful thinking.

Instead, the medical model can be an alternative to politicizing everything, for without life there can be no politics at all. Also, without sanity there can be no rational political ideology in the first place. We must ensure our survival first, in order even to begin to solve the current problems plaguing humanity.

Therefore, we have issued the following Prescriptions:

· The fact that the official establishment Doomsday Clock now counts down in seconds rather than in minutes, as it always had before 2020, should be understood as an urgent and unprecedented call to action that these crucial issues be immediately dealt with scientifically—or the metaphorical stroke of Midnight may be unavoidable. We must realize that the current President is in such a mentally-troubled state, that he cannot be allowed to make crucial decisions without constant and substantial oversight. Through one means or another, he should be subjected to a fully independent and verifiable, comprehensive mental health evaluation, for which there are standard, well-established guidelines.

· The U.S. must immediately rejoin the World Health Organization. All employees of the CDC, NIH, and HHS, especially those who were working on infectious diseases and pandemic containment, must be immediately brought back, and any additionally required funding and personnel must be immediately implemented, along with increases in university research grants pertaining to pandemic prevention and containment, as well as vaccine development.

The public needs to be educated that we, as psychiatrists and mental health experts, serve as an antidote to hyper-politicization. Our scientific model and medical applications, in fact, do not allow room for political considerations. We are essentially pre-political. This is how we, from all walks of life—and political affiliations—were able to arrive at a medical consensus on Donald Trump’s dangerous mental unfitness, observed long ago with copious, high-quality data over decades. We made consistently accurate and timely predictions as to how he would behave and how destructive he would become. None of this was made on a political assessment; indeed, we consider political interpretations to be irrelevant in a case of clear mental incapacity for rational decision making.

The public must be well-informed before it can understand the authenticity and ethics of our stance. Silence is therefore unacceptable. We must speak up now and share our knowledge, as we have since the very beginning of Donald Trump’s candidacy. As we noted in our Prescription for Survival 2025, “we are now at a severely progressed, existential state that needs professional medical input.” Neurologists are joining us, unhampered by the overblown “Goldwater rule,” distorted to serve the financial interests of the American Psychiatric Association. Physicians of all other specialties and general practice are supporting us, as they are capable of determining whether or not we have properly applied rigorous professional standards—not to mention sharing in our humanitarian concerns. The time has come, in our current “Psychological Age,” when the life or death of our species depends on one question: whether or not we would be able to master our own minds.

Announcement:

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